I’ll freely admit that I’m not sure I have the context necessary to evaluate Alain Resnais’ latest film, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” While based on what I have seen of Resnais’ work, I’d never go into one of his films expecting a conventional narrative, it feels like this film in particular leans heavily on some degree of foreknowledge of its primary cast, which I largely didn’t have. So I can only describe to you what my experience was watching the movie, essentially an actors’ master class in some ways, which was largely interesting, occasionally clever and, after a while, tedious.

The film opens with a cadre of French actors, all playing themselves, receiving a phone call that a playwright friend has died. The actors, including Lambert Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny and Michel Piccoli, to name the handful I’m familiar with, gather at their friend’s palatial home for the viewing of his video will. He only requires of them one thing: to watch a recording of the avant-garde rehearsal for one of his plays, “Eurydice,” and judge whether the rehearsal has enough merit to be staged fully. As every one of these actors had previously performed in that play, their memories of those roles soon come flooding back, and the actors – often multiple performers to a role – start performing the play again. Or at least they do in their minds. But what’s literal in a Resnais film, after all?

There’s possibly something to be said about the 91-year-old Resnais staging a play about death within a film about death, and individual scenes in the play come across like a final statement of sorts, but as I said, I’m not familiar enough with Resnais, outside of his most acclaimed, early features, to make any sort of declarative statement on that. As it stands, though, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” was probably more satisfying as an intellectual exercise that went completely over my head than as a film. I’m glad I saw it, but I couldn’t recommend it.

“Good Ol’ Freda” (***)

The Beatles have been written about and written about and written about, so any new work that purports to shine more light on the lives of some of the most public figures of the 20th century is rightly regarded with skepticism. But this documentary film, “Good Ol’ Freda,” does illuminate an aspect of Beatleology that I wasn’t very familiar with: Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ longtime secretary under the employ of Brian Epstein, who dutifully managed the Beatles Fan Club for more than a decade and whose personal relationships with the Fab Four and their families was constant from their earliest beginnings to the band’s final dissolution. I wouldn’t say “Good Ol’ Freda” contains any particularly revelatory moments about the Beatles themselves, but Kelly is, herself, a fascinating interviewee, whose personal recollections take us from the band’s earliest gigs at the Cavern in Liverpool to their unprecedented worldwide fame.

The most surprising thing about Kelly, then, is that after the breakup of the band, she felt content to slip into obscurity, and outside of her family and closest friends had not talked about her time with the Beatles until the making of this film. As of this film’s making, Kelly was still working as a secretary to make a living, with four boxes of Beatles memorabilia, photographs and so on tucked away in her attic. If anything, “Good Ol’ Freda” is a portrait of a woman fiercely committed to not only her own privacy but the privacy of the band and her old friends; there’s nothing particularly salacious about the Beatles or their lives (you can find plenty of that elsewhere), just a previously unknown perspective. And for the dedicated Beatles fan, it’s a must-see.

“The Spectacular Now” (****)

The teen comedy-drama “The Spectacular Now” is a wildly moving love story, a terrifically funny comedy and a breakout film for its young leads, Miles Teller, who you might recognize from “Rabbit Hole” and the “Footloose” remake, and Shailene Woodley, who kind of already broke out in “The Descendants,” but if you weren’t convinced by that, you damn well will be now. It’s the announcement of a major talent in director James Ponsoldt, whose previous feature film, “Smashed,” was quite good itself. There is no reason to believe that “The Spectacular Now” won’t get the widest possible release sometime in August, and when it does, it’ll renew your faith in the John Hughes-ian teen coming-of-age comedy like nothing in recent memory.

Teller plays Sutter Keely, a charismatic high school senior who has gotten pretty far on charm alone, with a poor tendency, even at age 18, to drink. This wears out his girlfriend (Brie Larson), and after a hard night of partying, Sutter is awoken on the lawn of a strange house by Aimee Finecky (Woodley), a bookish sort of loner type who immediately forms a sort of kinship with Sutter — and despite warnings from pretty much everyone that he’ll break her heart, he starts a rebound relationship with her. The two help each other grow in ways that Sutter did not anticipate, though his wake-up call, as is generally customary in movies of this sort, may come too late to salvage his relationship with Aimee, whose dedication to him might require Sutter to move out of his comfort zone of living in the moment.

“The Spectacular Now” weaves raw, honest and beguiling performances from Teller and Woodley, but also from a supporting cast that includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mary Elizabeth Winstead (of “Smashed”) and, in one of his first truly meaty and great post-“Friday Night Lights” roles, Kyle Chandler, who has a tendency to pop up in things and play Coach Taylor for a few lines but hasn’t really gotten to sink his teeth into a character like Sutter’s father in a while.

I know “The Spectacular Now” sounds like something you’ve seen before, but you haven’t seen it done this genuinely in a long, long time, with an on-screen romance that unfolds so realistically and tenderly and captures the thrill and horror of being a young person on the cusp of adulthood who finally has to take steps toward an uncertain future. I truly cannot wait to see it again.

“The History of Future Folk” (***)

“The History of Future Folk” is the kind of movie that takes whatever skepticism you might have about it – after all, it is a film about an off-beat, deadpan New York folk novelty band in the wake of Flight of the Conchords – and very quickly relieves you of it by staying true to its own wacky wavelength. The music’s fun, the jokes are funny and the thing has an agreeable low-budget charm. This was not my original choice for the last film of Day 2 – I had initially thought about seeing the horror film “Here Comes the Devil,” before deciding I was not in a horror mood – but it’s a choice I’m glad I made, and this film seems tailor-made for cult status.

Nils d’Auliare and Jay Klaitz play our bluegrass musical duo, who have come from the planet Hondo (where “Hondo” is also the customary greeting) to wipe out the human race so Earth can accommodate the fleeing Hondonian people, whose world is being threatened by a comet. But what the duo did not expect to discover is the human invention of music, which proves too seductive to carry out their mission.

“The History of Future Folk” is a silly comedy that never outstays its welcome, but it really comes alive in its musical sequences, with songs about harvesting space worms and various other hardships on Hondo. Kind of hard to dislike a movie that has a song centered on space worms, in my book.

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“You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” (** ½)

I’ll freely admit that I’m not sure I have the context necessary to evaluate Alain Resnais’ latest film, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” While based on what I have seen of Resnais’ work, I’d never go into one of his films expecting a conventional narrative, it feels like this film in particular leans heavily on some degree of foreknowledge of its primary cast, which I largely didn’t have. So I can only describe to you what my experience was watching the movie, essentially an actors’ master class in some ways, which was largely interesting, occasionally clever and, after a while, tedious.

The film opens with a cadre of French actors, all playing themselves, receiving a phone call that a playwright friend has died. The actors, including Lambert Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny and Michel Piccoli, to name the handful I’m familiar with, gather at their friend’s palatial home for the viewing of his video will. He only requires of them one thing: to watch a recording of the avant-garde rehearsal for one of his plays, “Eurydice,” and judge whether the rehearsal has enough merit to be staged fully. As every one of these actors had previously performed in that play, their memories of those roles soon come flooding back, and the actors – often multiple performers to a role – start performing the play again. Or at least they do in their minds. But what’s literal in a Resnais film, after all?

There’s possibly something to be said about the 91-year-old Resnais staging a play about death within a film about death, and individual scenes in the play come across like a final statement of sorts, but as I said, I’m not familiar enough with Resnais, outside of his most acclaimed, early features, to make any sort of declarative statement on that. As it stands, though, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” was probably more satisfying as an intellectual exercise that went completely over my head than as a film. I’m glad I saw it, but I couldn’t recommend it.

“Good Ol’ Freda” (***)

The Beatles have been written about and written about and written about, so any new work that purports to shine more light on the lives of some of the most public figures of the 20th century is rightly regarded with skepticism. But this documentary film, “Good Ol’ Freda,” does illuminate an aspect of Beatleology that I wasn’t very familiar with: Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ longtime secretary under the employ of Brian Epstein, who dutifully managed the Beatles Fan Club for more than a decade and whose personal relationships with the Fab Four and their families was constant from their earliest beginnings to the band’s final dissolution. I wouldn’t say “Good Ol’ Freda” contains any particularly revelatory moments about the Beatles themselves, but Kelly is, herself, a fascinating interviewee, whose personal recollections take us from the band’s earliest gigs at the Cavern in Liverpool to their unprecedented worldwide fame.

The most surprising thing about Kelly, then, is that after the breakup of the band, she felt content to slip into obscurity, and outside of her family and closest friends had not talked about her time with the Beatles until the making of this film. As of this film’s making, Kelly was still working as a secretary to make a living, with four boxes of Beatles memorabilia, photographs and so on tucked away in her attic. If anything, “Good Ol’ Freda” is a portrait of a woman fiercely committed to not only her own privacy but the privacy of the band and her old friends; there’s nothing particularly salacious about the Beatles or their lives (you can find plenty of that elsewhere), just a previously unknown perspective. And for the dedicated Beatles fan, it’s a must-see.

“The Spectacular Now” (****)

The teen comedy-drama “The Spectacular Now” is a wildly moving love story, a terrifically funny comedy and a breakout film for its young leads, Miles Teller, who you might recognize from “Rabbit Hole” and the “Footloose” remake, and Shailene Woodley, who kind of already broke out in “The Descendants,” but if you weren’t convinced by that, you damn well will be now. It’s the announcement of a major talent in director James Ponsoldt, whose previous feature film, “Smashed,” was quite good itself. There is no reason to believe that “The Spectacular Now” won’t get the widest possible release sometime in August, and when it does, it’ll renew your faith in the John Hughes-ian teen coming-of-age comedy like nothing in recent memory.

Teller plays Sutter Keely, a charismatic high school senior who has gotten pretty far on charm alone, with a poor tendency, even at age 18, to drink. This wears out his girlfriend (Brie Larson), and after a hard night of partying, Sutter is awoken on the lawn of a strange house by Aimee Finecky (Woodley), a bookish sort of loner type who immediately forms a sort of kinship with Sutter — and despite warnings from pretty much everyone that he’ll break her heart, he starts a rebound relationship with her. The two help each other grow in ways that Sutter did not anticipate, though his wake-up call, as is generally customary in movies of this sort, may come too late to salvage his relationship with Aimee, whose dedication to him might require Sutter to move out of his comfort zone of living in the moment.

“The Spectacular Now” weaves raw, honest and beguiling performances from Teller and Woodley, but also from a supporting cast that includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mary Elizabeth Winstead (of “Smashed”) and, in one of his first truly meaty and great post-“Friday Night Lights” roles, Kyle Chandler, who has a tendency to pop up in things and play Coach Taylor for a few lines but hasn’t really gotten to sink his teeth into a character like Sutter’s father in a while.

I know “The Spectacular Now” sounds like something you’ve seen before, but you haven’t seen it done this genuinely in a long, long time, with an on-screen romance that unfolds so realistically and tenderly and captures the thrill and horror of being a young person on the cusp of adulthood who finally has to take steps toward an uncertain future. I truly cannot wait to see it again.

“The History of Future Folk” (***)

“The History of Future Folk” is the kind of movie that takes whatever skepticism you might have about it – after all, it is a film about an off-beat, deadpan New York folk novelty band in the wake of Flight of the Conchords – and very quickly relieves you of it by staying true to its own wacky wavelength. The music’s fun, the jokes are funny and the thing has an agreeable low-budget charm. This was not my original choice for the last film of Day 2 – I had initially thought about seeing the horror film “Here Comes the Devil,” before deciding I was not in a horror mood – but it’s a choice I’m glad I made, and this film seems tailor-made for cult status.

Nils d’Auliare and Jay Klaitz play our bluegrass musical duo, who have come from the planet Hondo (where “Hondo” is also the customary greeting) to wipe out the human race so Earth can accommodate the fleeing Hondonian people, whose world is being threatened by a comet. But what the duo did not expect to discover is the human invention of music, which proves too seductive to carry out their mission.

“The History of Future Folk” is a silly comedy that never outstays its welcome, but it really comes alive in its musical sequences, with songs about harvesting space worms and various other hardships on Hondo. Kind of hard to dislike a movie that has a song centered on space worms, in my book.